How Does Your Pay Stack Up?

Great employers know they need to pay competitive wages to attract the best employees. A cool culture isn’t a currency that pays the landlord or the grocery store. But if you’re making the transition from being a one or two-person band to hiring a team, it’s hard to figure out what salaries will pull in the folks you really want.

A new document from the U.S. Census Bureau, “Statistics of U.S. Businesses Employment and Payroll Summary: 2012,” offers an intriguing look at what firms of all sizes are really paying their workers, on average. Interestingly, very small firms are not as far behind big ones with deeper pockets in paying employees as you might expect. The average salary per employee at firms with under 20 employees—which make up 18% of all employer firms—is $36,912, compared to $40,446 for firms of all sizes up to 500 employees and $52,554 for big companies. However, the gap varies a lot by industry.

The Census report doesn’t offer average pay by job title, but it does offer a fascinating overview of how wages in different industries compare and vary by company size—data that may be as useful a reality check for job hunters as it is to employers. The report also shows where microbusinesses--the mom and pops and startups in many communities--have created the most jobs. Very small businesses have the greatest representation in accommodation and food services, health care and social assistance, and manufacturing.

Here is how the average pay stacks up by industry at firm that have a payroll (as opposed to nonemployer firms run only by the owners), based on the 2012 data the Census used.

I’ve ranked the industries from the one with the highest paying microbusinesses to the lowest but included average pay at other size firms so you can compare. They are broken down by microbusinesses (under 20 employees); small companies (20 to 99 employees); medium enterprises (100 to 499 employees) and large firms (500 or more employees).

The government organizes the industries by their North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes, and there are some odd bedfellows here, so view this data as a very blunt instrument. For very specific data on pay in your industry, I've found reports by Payscale can come in handy.

1. Management of companies and enterprises (Includes companies that own equity in other companies and/or manage and oversee them)